Audio and video consumption on the Internet continues to rise from a baseline of mainly text consumption. Additional bandwidth and speed in the backbone networks, along with price decreases in consumer storage, supports consumer appetites for the richer experience gleaned from audio and video. For example, new protocols such as IEEE 802.11ac provide aggregated packets with large data fields for combining several different packets into a single aggregated packet. Under IEE 802.11ac, every packet is typically an aggregated packet, regardless of content.
Problematically, the rising popularity of VOIP traffic strains network efficiency in a different way. Namely, VOIP traffic can operate on lower data rates (e.g., 54 Mb/s) which keep the channel busy for relatively longer periods of time when filling up the large data fields of aggregated packets. Consequentially, as VOIP traffic increases on a channel using aggregated packets, so do does the collision rate and network congestion.
What is needed is a robust technique to dynamically resize aggregation windows based on network congestion from VOIP traffic or other compositions of traffic.